The 10 best games for destroying your social life

Some games demand more than a couple of nights a week. Some games are so compulsive, so infuriantingly addictive, that we disappear for months at a time before we're eventually pried from our sofas, squinting and wheezing like naked mole rats, scrabbling with our wasted muscles for one more squeeze of the controller. If you've never been there, perhaps you have more self-control than us. Or perhaps you've never played any of the following, rated by their power to keep you from the outside world...

10. Darksiders (2010)

Not 'apocalyptic' in the usual Hollywood movie sense, but literally apocalyptic in that players take control of War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, during the final battle between heaven and hell. A dark, super-dramatic Zelda, it combines tricky combat with adventure aspects and a massive gameworld stocked of terrors to keep you playing well past the 50-hour mark.

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9. Final Fantasy VII (1997)

For years, the only story a video game managed was that one about some woman being kidnapped and us having to rescue her. Then Final Fantasy VII came along, with months’ worth of non-stop emotional storytelling and the power to make adults cry. Not us, obviously, but, you know. Other people.

8. Grand Theft Auto V (2013)

It's not just the very big world that makes GTA V such an absorber of time, but the way in which players are encouraged to explore it. The quest to steal one particular type of car. Finding specific places that trigger UFO and ghost sightings. The mystery door at the bottom of the sea. It's a proper world, one in which weekends disappear in the blink of a bleary, screen-reddened eye.